A Remarkable Story from the Past.

Easter Weekend. And when the Spring weather is here, with the sunshine warming the air and our neighbours enjoying their backyard socials - or garden parties if you prefer to use a more posh language. Wise on them. At least they knew better than to end up stuck in a motorway traffic snarl-up. Should a man be seen walking along the opposite carriageway and enough drivers rubbernecking to create a traffic standstill, this would be more likely to occur during a bank holiday.

View of the Natural History Museum from the Member's Lounge.

Or at the airports. Indeed, what has happened to travel? For example, I remember 1993. That was the year I flew out to Israel for a two-week stint in Jerusalem. However, I was stuck in the departure lounge at Gatwick Airport for six hours while waiting for a small lubricating oil tube to be fitted somewhere inside the plane. And so, I sat for six hours among a group of Orthodox Jews who took in the situation quite calmly, with several falling asleep. Good for them. At least they weren't showing any near panic like I did by pacing from one end of the lounge to the other every now and again.

But at least, there were no queues when I arrived at the check-in desk. Instead, I was able to walk straight to it and deposit my rucksack. Then within minutes, I made my way to the lounge after passing through security. This easy, no-queue check-in occurred at the start of other trips, including check-in for New York at London Heathrow for both 1975 and 1998 trips and the flight to Singapore in 1997. On one occasion, I recall an almost deserted terminal with the appropriate desk clerk waiting for the next passenger to dispose of his luggage at the conveyor. 

Then again, all these flights were booked for take-off whilst the kids sat in their classes at school and the majority of the population commuted to their workplaces during the middle of the week. Oh, the joys of self-employment where I can choose any time of the year to travel.

And so, as this is the first Easter break without any Covid restrictions for two years, people seem desperate for a holiday, especially overseas. And so, families are told when they can go by both their employers and their children's school term regulations. In addition, the closure of the railways for the holiday period means that the replacement bus is enough to deter anyone from approaching the station and deciding to drive instead. Or to stay at home. Not that the closure of our particular line is unusual. Whenever our trains are running at any weekend, then this must be heralded across the nation!

And so, other lines are closed over the Easter break for track maintenance, including London Euston to Milton Keynes, the main corridor linking our capital to the Lake District National Park, a popular holiday destination.

And so, here in the UK, on the first Easter holidays since the end of the pandemic, travel dominates the news. Crowded airports, road traffic congestion, no trains running, and oh yes, lest I forget, restricted ferry crossing over the Channel, as one company, P&O Ferries, have their two ships detained at port. Thanks to a clever executive who had all 800 trained employees crewing the two ships, fired. Just to save money. Thus, miles of vehicles snake inland away from the port of Dover, and I wonder how many now have regrets about booking a Channel crossing at this time of the year?

Far better to remain at home and in this good weather, enjoy a garden barbeque. At least, that is what our neighbours are currently doing. And when Easter weekend used to be a time of melancholic rumination over the Crucifixion of Jesus Christ two millennia in the past, and then to celebrate his Resurrection on Easter Sunday, instead, spoiled or ruined leisure trips are brooded over by many, others stay at home and barbecue, others go out on an egg-hunt, still, others make every effort to ensure all enjoy a good respite from the daily work routine. But the thought of the intense sufferings endured by a condemned Jew such a long time ago barely receives a thought from the secular-minded, let alone any thoughts of resurrection.

Just the previous evening, my wife and I watched the BBC programme, Dinosaurs: The Final Day, presented by David Attenborough. Although an excellent presentation, I have wondered whether it was merely a coincidence such a documentary was broadcast on Good Friday. It was about how an asteroid plunged into our planet and in a single stroke, wiped out the dinosaurs some 65,000,000 years ago. As a petrified skin of a Triceratops was excavated, even I was amazed that the sandy beach of an ancient river on which the beasts thrived, was overwhelmed by a flood caused by a tsunami created by the asteroid strike, itself a thousand miles away. And the fossil, like all other fossils, bears witness to having been laid by water.

Therefore it was the day before, Maundy Thursday, that I made a second visit to the Museum of Natural History in London, about a month after my first visit. The purpose of this was to examine more fossils that seem to tell a story that differed from Attenborough's presentation.

As I noted the skull of an Ichthyosaur fossilised with a morsel of food still between its jaws, on my first visit, I also examined a Coelophysis that died with a stomach full of a recently eaten meal, believed that of a small crocodile. But on this visit, I managed to examine a full-bodied fossil of another Ichthyosaur. What's extraordinary about this specimen was that it was not only pregnant with three embryos at the moment of death, but a fourth offspring was in the process of being born, tail first, at the moment of death. And nearby, another smaller fossil of an Ichthyosaur had died suddenly with its stomach full.

Detail of a baby Ichthyosaur in the process of birth.

What's going on? If the fossil record indicates that the three Ichthyosaurs, along with the Coelophysis, all died suddenly whilst "business as usual" - then was there another catastrophe long before the asteroid strike? For, according to the palaeontologists who dated these fossils, these submarine beasts all died some 178,000,000 years ago, along with the Coelophysis, which died around 196,000,000 years ago. If their calculations are correct, the "slight discrepancy" in their deaths before the date of the asteroid strike is at least 113,000,000 years difference! 

I am astonished by the fossil record. No matter which fossil I examine, they all tell the same story - sudden death and instant burial, although I wonder whether these organisms were actually buried alive. Whichever may be, these visits I have recently made to the museum seem to indicate to me that all these fossils occurred at one moment of catastrophe.

But who am I to make such an analysis? I, a retired window cleaner who had never seen the inside of a university? How could I compare myself with such great academia whose authority is respected worldwide? How could I compare with the likes of Sir David Attenborough? Here am I, a creationist of whom the secular world would class me as one committed to a pseudoscience, especially of the Noachian Deluge dismissed as a fantasy, a legend or even to the point of being ridiculous.

Yet, I live in a country whose Constitution is founded on the Christian Gospel, the good news is that Jesus Christ came to save sinners by dying on a cross, was buried, and three days after burial, he rose physically from the dead. Hence, Easter is celebrated annually to remember this threefold set of glorious events, along with Christmas, the holiday that celebrates the birth of Christ, and also Whitsun, the holiday commemorating the descent of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost. Three Christian holidays define a nation's Constitution, even our monarch, Queen Elizabeth II, profess a strong faith in Jesus Christ as her personal Saviour.

This same Jesus Christ speaks of both supernatural creation and the Noachian Deluge as factual history. I'm then left with a threefold choice: Either I accept, question or reject outright what Christ taught during his ministry. If I accept, which is my lifelong position, then it's imperative that I also accept the early chapters of the Biblical book of Genesis as factual history. Even if such chapters contain a supernatural Creation of all things, the Fall, and the Flood - issues taught with equal certainty by the apostles, Paul and Peter and endorsed as historic by all the other apostles and the early church.

And all that was the standard thinking of a typical Briton before the rise of Charles Darwin. Church attendance was all but compulsory during these annual holidays and they were attended by a majority. Easter was all about Jesus Christ.

Indeed, one Jehovah's Witness-turned-atheist YouTuber asked three rational questions. One was, how could all the animals which are naturally carnivorous and have all the biological and genetic attributes of meat-eating design possibly be created originally as herbivores? The second question was: In the new world to come, how could Jehovah possibly take a naturally carnivorous animal such as a cat, and then transform it into a plant-eater and still be recognised as a cat? And thirdly, if Noah was 500 years old when his three sons were born, then how could Noah and his wife had no children in the 480 years preceding the quick and the repeated birth of Shem, Ham and Japheth?

To all three, as a Creationist, I can't give any convincing answer. But after the Fall, the Edenic Curse seemed to have involved a dramatic change in Eve's anatomy, making childbearing now a painful issue, whence before, it was to be with minimum pain or even no pain at all. If this was true, then it looks as if the curse affected all of creation, with the sudden change in the appearance of all carnivorous and even many herbivores. This might have appeared rather terrifying to both Adam and Eve to have watched this rapid transformation take place in front of them, as the consequential reality of his sin takes hold. Such anatomical changes may have involved the need to defecate for the first time, although I am aware that other Creationists will disagree with me on this. Also, both initial creation and the curse are once-for-all dramatic events that happened at the time and nothing of the kind is happening now.

Just as secular scientists admit that there are gaps in their knowledge of some specific subjects and these gaps will eventually be filled by dedicated research and experimentation, I, in turn, admit that I can't answer the three questions above with any dogmatism. All I can do is speculate. For example, how old Noah was when he met and married his wife, we're not told. He could have married as young as twenty years, but equally, if not more likely, he might have remained single for hundreds of years. This isn't unreasonable. I have known people to have reached old age and never married.

Indeed, such debates can drag on, and it won't bring even the honest doubter to conversion, let alone a staunch atheist. Yet, these questions are broadcasted to any listening members of the public with the resulting conclusion that the Bible is a fictional book written by ancient men who had very little or no knowledge of science and therefore were bound by superstitions and religious beliefs.

Easter is about the Resurrection of Christ.

And so we have a national celebration of Easter. As our neighbours continue to party outside in their back garden, this happy socialising isn't likely about Jesus Christ at all. Rather, it's more likely a celebration of a long weekend, a respite from work, to be glad that the days are getting longer, the weather warmer, the onset of Spring, followed by Summer. The social could also be a means to forget the sorrows of the world, such as the war in Ukraine or the sharp rise in living costs.

But when the egg hunt gets underway among families, and even in churches, my strongest desire is that such enjoyment will be centred on Jesus, for Easter is all about Jesus, who died a torturous death to bring real life to all of us.

I wish you a happy Easter.

What I Find So Amazing...

I can think of twelve people considered to be the most fortunate in the whole of human history. I even have their names: Peter, James, John, Andrew, Bartholomew, Thomas, Matthew, Philip, Thaddaeus, Simon, James, Judas. To any reader, whether he is a Christian or not, these twelve names should immediately strike a sense of familiarity about them. They were the twelve apostles of Jesus Christ, who had the unique privilege of spending three years of their lives in the presence of the Son of God, the incarnation of the Second Person of the Holy Trinity. A privilege the rest of mankind had never experienced.

Even among them, Jesus had his three favourites: Peter, James and John. As James and John were brothers, both sons of Zebedee, so Peter and Andrew were also brothers, sons of Jonas. Yet Andrew was the only one of the four brothers who was not selected to ascend the mountain to witness the Transformation. I wonder how Andrew would have felt as what might be taken as excluded from a specific clique, especially involving his own brother Peter. After all, he was just a fisherman too, along with James and John. Nothing special. However, he didn't have long to ponder, because as the remaining nine were milling around at the foot of the hill, along comes this stranger whose son was demon possessed. Having witnessed a number of successful cases of deliverance by Jesus, these nine attempted to give this one a go, but without any success. Stumped, and most likely downcast at the spirit's stubbornness to shift, how fortunate it was for the Lord himself to appear at the right moment with his three friends.

Rivalry between these men was never too far below the surface. On a couple of occasions a quarrel would arise on who was the greatest. The Lord's answer to their dispute was that anyone who wants to be the greatest must be the servant and humble as a young child. Then according to Matthew 20:20-27, the mother of James and John approached Jesus with a request that her two sons would sit on the most privileged thrones in the Kingdom. These two had already witnessed the Transformation, therefore it was no big surprise that the other ten were indignant, including Peter, the only other who was also up on that mountain. Again Jesus rebuked them with the same answer of servitude. I guess that the quest for personal status was not that much different to what it is today. Yet Peter, James and John were fishermen, not unlike any commercial fishermen with us at present. Among the remaining nine who were left behind included a Zealot, a taxman, and also the group's treasurer.

Which surprises me in a way, why Matthew was not the treasurer. After all, as the tax collector, he had quite an experience with handling money. Instead, the role went to Judas Iscariot, whose background I know virtually nothing about, except that he found delight in dipping into the funds for his own pleasure. However, according to some sources, Iscariot might have been a scholar himself, perhaps some form of philosopher. In Franco Zeffirelli's film Jesus of Nazareth, Judas Iscariot presents himself as a scholar to Jesus, not like those scummy fishermen whom the Lord seem to favour. Instead, he encourages Jesus to behold, the scholar. The Lord takes him in, a contrast to being initially called as was the case with the others. And whatever his scholarship might have been, he was entrusted with the funds, rather than Matthew. 

"Behold, the scholar!" Judas in Jesus of Nazareth.

And what a tragic end for the scholar! As a result of the guilt he felt after betraying Jesus to the Sanhedrin, he hanged himself and departed from this planet into a lost eternity, the only one of the Twelve who was shut out from Heaven. I suppose money had everything to do with his downfall. At first he most likely persuaded Jesus to allow himself to take care of the money bag instead of Matthew having to do it, using his scholarship as a vantage point. Then he helped himself whenever no one was looking. Then he bartered with the Sanhedrin and with the Pharisees to hand Jesus to them for thirty pieces of silver. That is a large amount of money, considered to be a nest-egg he can retire upon and live the rest of his life in luxury. 

I suppose that in all cultures, both past and present, there has always been something grand about a scholar. Someone to look up to, an icon for respect, maybe even a god to worship. In ancient Greece, there was a whole pantheon of bickering divinities, whether they stole each other's wives or performed some other unseemly acts, nevertheless a temple was always found in a city which was dedicated to each one of them. Could these divinities stem from some very human heroes or from men of outstanding learning? That said, great scholars such as Solon, Pythagoras, Eratosthenes, Hippocrates, Plato, Aristotle, and many more, none had ever made it into the realm of the pantheon, although their names remain familiar to this day. Therefore I tend to believe that all those within the realm of the ancient Egyptian, Assyrian, Babylonian, Persian, Greek and Roman pantheons were antediluvian "heroic men of renown" - offspring between fallen angels and pre-Flood human women, according to Genesis 6:1-4, with tremendous mental and intellectual powers and physical prowess.

I am so glad that such sexual intimacy between fallen angels and the daughters of men had ended with the Deluge. I dread what our world would be like if these guys were around at present! Worse than that, chances that if the Flood wasn't sent during Noah's day, such continuous interbreeding would have eventually choked the Messianic Line. With such Nephilim existing within the line of Shem, Abraham and David, the incarnation of the Son of God would never have occurred, due to the impairment of the genome. Instead, according to 2 Peter 2:4, all the angels who had sinned, with the exception of Lucifer, are now confined to Tartarus, a subterranean prison of gloom and darkness, awaiting Judgement, whilst every demon most likely is a Nephilim disembodied by the Flood, and according to Ephesians 6:12, even right up to the present, roaming the air in want of a body, and is fully aware of its own defeat by the death and Resurrection of Jesus Christ. The angelic confinement to Tartarus, I believe, is to prevent the interbreeding between those supernatural beings and human women from reoccurring, therefore preserving the Messianic Line and fulfilling the Promise of Genesis 3:15. One way of putting it, the Flood of Noah was also an act of mercy towards the redemption of mankind as well as a punishment for the wicked and the nonredeemable.

And so as the ancestors deified these Nephilim to divinity and built pagan temples in dedication to them, so it looks to be normal human nature to exalt the great among us to this day. And that includes church life where roving guest speakers are assigned greater honour than the regular preacher or church pastor. The snag with that is heresy can be passed onto his listeners in a very subtle way which seems so orthodox, so Biblical. The worst case scenario is when someone comes along, who claim to be Oxford- or Cambridge-educated, and then publicly preach his denial of Eternal Security of the believer, such content denying the Omniscience of God and weakening the effect of the Atonement. And as I have so recently written already, this has happened. Rather than edify, the sermon caused a near-riot at a theatre where the preaching took place, and counselling sessions were needed afterwards. But after all that, whenever I advocated Eternal Security, someone would look me straight in my eyes and tell me off for daring to cross such a well-educated individual!

With the highly educated held in such reverential respect, I could not help let out a loud groan whilst still in bed. For the morning bulletin on the radio announced the death of one of the nation's top scientists, Professor Stephen Hawking. My heart was sad, very sad for him. This was because Dr. Hawking declared himself to be an atheist. Indeed, my skin always crawl whenever I hear of the death of a known atheist.

Am I being arrogant? After all, who am I to determine the eternal state of someone who has just died? No, in myself I have no right whatsoever to say whether this particular person is now in Hell or not. The case of Ananias and Sapphira is good case point here. Luke does not state their eternal destiny following their deaths as a result of deceitfulness and lying to the Holy Spirit (Acts 5:1-11). This particular couple was seeking glory and honour within the church without deserving it. So they sold a field and gave some of their money to the apostles, but lied when they said that their money was all they had. They kept part of it for themselves and paid the ultimate price. But we are not told where they are spending eternity. And so theologians can be locked in a debate over this issue, without the Bible's blessing.

By contrast, Stephen Hawking had no intention of being deliberately deceitful. He was a man fascinated with science. He admitted his admiration for the Universe, and especially with Black Holes - how were they created, how powerful their energy, and what would be the consequence if our planet was sucked into one, and how long do they last before finally expiring. This with his study of the Universe and how it all began - without acknowledging the Creator. He genuinely believed, without malicious intent, that the complexity of the Universe, our Earth with all its life, and Evolution and the vast time spans needed for such to happen, all ruled out the need of a Creator, who is now confined to ignorance on scientific origins of our Universe. Indeed, according to Hawking, science has replaced for the need to believe in God.

Dr. Hawking was well known for his motor neurone disease which weakened his muscles to the point of paralysis, confining him to a wheelchair. With marvellous technology, he was able to make his thoughts known by a monotone voice emitting from a computer fixed in front of him. Of all the disabled he was one of the more fortunate ones. Up to the age of twenty he was able-bodied, and his brilliant mind and advanced academic progress has already earned him a place at Cambridge. Had he been born already disabled, chances that he would never had become a modern-day Albert Einstein. Instead, his middle-class upbringing gave him such advantage before his health folded in on itself. Indeed, there is that tendency within society to look upon a physically disabled person born that way as if he is also simple-minded as well, and incapable of high-level learning. Dr. Hawking was fortunate indeed.

The late Stephen Hawking.

But what I know of him, little as it might be, I wasn't able to see any misdeed or anything unseemly about him. He was for the well-being of humanity, even if that means remaining in the EU. A complete opposite to the far-right who promotes violence, even murder, towards the ethnically diverse and those who tends to be more internationally minded. Rather like the Britain First leaders and their members who were willing to beat Muslims to bloody pulp in the name of Christianity and patriotism. Dr. Hawking had none of any of that in him.

Hawking loved science, he wanted to do good to the rest of mankind, he wanted to educate, but he was also an atheist. But I still refuse to say where he is now. It is not up to me to judge, for that belongs to God alone. Yet I mourn for him. If only -if only - he knew Jesus Christ as his Saviour. Would knowing Christ impair his knowledge? Rather, his knowledge would have been enriched. He would have still studied the Universe and glory in its complexity, then give thanks to God for his magnificent creation, opening the door for praise and worship whilst wondering in awe and admiration.

Such a brilliant mind. Such a sky-high intelligence quotient. But he never knew God his Creator. 

And that is what I find so amazing.